Ares 2 opened up, Enyo 2 updated with improved scrolling and lists

With the runway from April showers into May flowers growing short, HP is closing out the week by making good on their April code commitments for webOS. What can you expect to find in HP's various GitHubs today? How about the beginnings of Ares 2, an update to Enyo 2, and the Node.js JavaScript platform? Yeah, that'll do (and it matches up with what the roadmap said to expect).

First things first, let's tackle Ares 2. While just a bullet point on the roadmap, Ares 2 is the next generation of Palm's in-browser app builder, and it's now fully paired with Enyo 2 (whereas the original Ares was built for Mojo and Ares of the original variety). Ares 2, unlike its predecessor, is built off of Node.js (more on that later), which will enable developers to use it locally on their own machines or up in the cloud - all with a "pluggable, decentralized approach to file storage" to give developers even more flexibility. Ares 2 isn't yet complete - it's described as being "still in the early stages" - though that isn't stopping HP from turning public the GitHub for the project. But hey, you'll be able to easily build Enyo 2 apps that work across all web-compatible platforms, so that'll eventually be cool.

A number of other webOS components are seeing their release into open source today. There's an updated build of Enyo 2, bringing significantly-improved mobile scrolling performance and a "highly-optimized cross-platform virtual list control" widget. the Node.js event-driven Javascript services platform is also going open source, and in an April surprise, the System Manager Bus (otherwise known as Luna-service2) is going open source three months earlier than planned. The Node.js-reliant System Manager Bus manages the inter-process communications mechanism for Open webOS and includes monitoring and debugging utilities. You know, for when we have enough components to build a functioning operating system; we're getting there, we swear.

So there you have it, April's Open webOS code commitments are here. Coming up in May… well, actually, there's nothing on the roadmap for May or June. Could be a quiet few months, or HP could surprise us and release some other components to open source early. We wouldn't mind that one byte.